Free Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian

She is the only one who can help, give us guidance.”
    Prince Roland put down his silverware with a clank. “I will not tolerate the endless chattering and malodorous concoctions of that witch! Not here, not ever again!”
    “She’s not a witch! She saved your son, Your Highness. He would not have been born living, and you know it.”
    “The priests at Holy Mass and my physicians saved my son!”
    “No. Without Grial, he would never have passed out of my body safely. I would have been dead too.” The Princess’s expression began to take on a feverish intensity.
    “Lucia  . . .” he said at last, this time softly. “I do not want her here. I know you and everyone in this blessed world likes her, and it may be uncharitable of me, but—what she is, everything about her disturbs me. It is unnatural—unholy.”
    “My beloved, it is merely very old. Please, I beg you. She is harmless, a truly good woman. Let her come and speak to us. You already have your priests reading the Mass, and surely the Lord in Heaven is magnanimous enough to allow a genuinely kind woman’s folk ministrations down here on earth alongside the holy prayers of his priests.”
    There was a long pause of silence, during which Prince Roland could surely hear his mother’s agony-rattle twelve rooms away, drilling at his mind, his sanity. He could hear it resounding in the china and the polished stone of the floor.
    “Well, then. Let her come tonight,” he said while ice settled in the back of his throat. “Only this once.”
     
    G rial was shown into a small room of the Palace. She was a middle-aged townswoman with very lively dark eyes, dressed in what could easily be described as unwashed rags, with unruly and brittle witch-hair—ash and silver and black all intermingled into an uncombed mess barely contained by a knotted multicolored kerchief—so it was no wonder the Prince considered her an unholy sorceress from the forests. However Grial was merely from the depths of another sort—the narrow refuse-alleys and cobblestone streets and grimy filth of poverty.
    Grial had prospered somewhat in the recent years from her unusual midwifery and healing skills, and not less from her even more uncanny ability to foretell events and interpret signs of things to come. But to admit need for such extreme services was not easy—most came to her in clandestine supplication, and she assisted with matters that were deemed beyond hopeless by the doctors and clergymen. Healing warts and easing women’s bleeding was rote; healing the mind and easing sorrow, now that was a real feat. They paid her well enough so that she could first open her own stall in the markets of Letheburg and then buy a storefront and put up a shingle—though she never seemed to manage a new dress or pair of clog shoes.
    Anyone else in her position would have been driven out of town. But Grial was not the typical fortuneteller or herb-and-sorcery woman who spoke in cryptic omens, scowled, and kept to herself. Indeed, Grial was an oddity because, except for her dandelion mess of hair and infernally grimy clothes, she was so normal —a cheerful and sociable personality, a gossip, and seeming to be in all places at once over town, friendly to everyone and with an impossible memory for human detail. Wherever you turned in Letheburg, there was Grial, in the markets, sticking her nose into bake and tobacco shops and taverns and arguing with the old and young men who lined up around alehouses, chatting up priests and merchants, waving in good cheer to whores and fine matrons alike whether they knew her or not, and acting in general as if all of the city was a tiny village of no more than ten folk and she knew them all as good neighbors.
    Such was Grial. So, why then did the Crown Prince of Lethe find her so unpalatable, nay, terrifying?
    The answer lay in himself. Roland Osenni did not trust things or people that seemed too good to be true. When Grial saved the life of his newborn son,